


Should the time come

by CamilleDuDemon



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Assassination Attempt(s), Implied Relationships, Lovers To Enemies, M/M, Unpleasant Nighttime Talk, twisted feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 14:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21163298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CamilleDuDemon/pseuds/CamilleDuDemon
Summary: On the left side of his face, from the temple down to his upper lip, a big, purplish bruise has taken over his usually pale skin. The thing has already started to get yellow on the edges and soon it will darken out to a sickly shade of brown dotted here and there by drops of caked blood, where the skin was tender and it has broken more easily.Ren – now Supreme Leader Kylo Ren – has tossed him against a durasteel wall. It’s not the first time and, as much as Hux hates to admit how powerless he is at the moment, it’s not gonna be the last. Not until he’ll be able to catch Ren off guard, then…Then he’ll be able to shoot him between the eyes.He won’t suffer, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to suffer, he only has to…die. To disappear. Fade away.Then, only then, General Hux will have his hard earned peace of mind and his rightful place on the throne, where he has to sit, he needs to sit, he craves to sit.





	Should the time come

The first thing General Hux does as soon as his workday has apparently finished – which may not be entirely true, since some of his longest shifts have taken up a straight 72 hours with no chance of resting or whatsoever – is to get back to his private quarters, not even bothering to spare a glance to his chrono to read what time of the cycle it should be. What’s for sure is that the lights have long switched to night shift mode and that he’s tired, tired and sore and angry and any sort of negative feeling he can imagine. And, to be honest, he can imagine quite a lot of negative feelings, he was practically born and raised in negative feelings, suffering years and years of abuse and neglect.

_From the cradle to the grave, in a cycle that’s impossible to break._

Silence and darkness welcome him home, as he neatly tucks his boots in a retractable cubicle and he strips off his uniform, in which he’s feeling like choking all too often nowadays.

_It’s not just about the uniform, all the fucking choking thing. _His inner voice snaps at him and, for the first time in what it feels like eons, General Hux doesn’t snarl back in a banter that’s all inside his head but feels just as exhausting as if it was happening on the material plane of existence.

Too broken, perhaps. Too tired. Too weak. Too disillusioned.

Perhaps he has faced one too many bad things for a lifetime, now.

Or maybe he’s just derailing; maybe it’s the exhaustion speaking, just the exhaustion, and tomorrow he’ll be back to his usual adamant and composed self.

Shaking his head, the General retrieves a clean cloth from his supply and heads straight to the refresher, where he meets his reflection in the small mirror and grimaces at the sight, clenching his jaw so hard he feels the painful protest of his teeth reverberating through his whole skull.

On the left side of his face, from the temple down to his upper lip, a big, purplish bruise has taken over his usually pale skin. The _thing _has already started to get yellow on the edges and soon it will darken out to a sickly shade of brown dotted here and there by drops of caked blood, where the skin was tender and it has broken more easily.

Ren – now _Supreme Leader Kylo Ren – _has tossed him against a durasteel wall. It’s not the first time and, as much as Hux hates to admit how powerless he is at the moment, it’s not gonna be the last. Not until he’ll be able to catch Ren off guard, then…

_Then he’ll be able to shoot him between the eyes._

He won’t suffer, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to suffer, he only has to…_die. _To disappear. Fade away.

Then, only then, General Hux will have his hard earned peace of mind and his rightful place on the throne, where he has to sit, he needs to sit, _he craves to sit._

_Not yet._

Sadly, this time he has to agree with the voice of his conscience, let’s say he has one. Not yet. When the time comes. When the time comes. _Whenthetimecomeswhenthetimecomeswhenthetimecomes---_

He keeps telling it to himself until the sentence becomes a mere dull throbbing in the back of his aching head. Not bad: it’s a good tune to lull himself to sleep.

*

General Hux doesn’t know what is that woke him up, precisely. It has started with a _tingle_, a slight disturbance in the air around him. Something that radiates danger and threat and---

“You’re here”, he simply states. Kylo Ren is somewhere in the room and his presence, though concealed in the shadows, can be very well detected by this weird thing, this weird thing that happens whenever he enters a room: the atmosphere bends and twitches, it stretches and bubbles as if millions of atoms of oxygen are trying to run away from him. As if he could scare away the air itself.

Hux has never known someone as imposing, as dangerous, as damaged.

_As damaging._

Ren’s laconic remark is a mere “Yes”. As long as he’s not here for a group therapy session, Hux is okay with his one-word answers. If you’re slowly drifting away from someone who has once meant the world to you – even if you’ve never had the nerve to admit it -, it helps. One-word answers help building up resentment, and resentment washes away the sorrow, the _oh-so-many _regrets.

Suddenly, he feels the mattress creak under Ren’s weight, under his bulky and muscular mass, and then they’re back-to-back, with too many things that should be said and absolutely no wish to start a proper conversation about anything.

_You hurt me, _Hux thinks. In the cacophony of his thoughts, this seems to be the most coherent one. A stand-alone sentence, simple and straight, not the jagged fragment of a whole monologue. Ren, Supreme Leader Ren, doesn’t even flinch.

“You tried to kill me”, he says, monotonous and surprisingly calm, given the situation.

_And I should have gone through with it. I should have killed you when I had the chance._

Now it’s Hux’s turn to reply with only a faint “yes”.

Ren presses on.

“You still want to kill me.”

_When the time comes._

“Yes.”

A dense silence hangs over the room for something like a solid thirty minutes. Hux spends this ludicrously long time counting Ren’s steady breaths, trying to picture how the air gets in and out his restless lips. Always moving. Always twitching, trembling.

He was fond of those lips, once. He loved to bite into the tender flesh and lick away the pain caused by his sharp teeth, and Ren used to moan in such a filthy way it still ignites a spark in his loins everytime he dares to venture down on memory lane.

Neither of them has fallen asleep, even if they’re not speaking. Ren, at least, isn’t; Hux is persuaded to think he’s scanning his mind, trying to navigate through the complex strings of thoughts unfolding and retracting, traveling from a brain cell to the other without getting anywhere.

_Stuck._

A collection of words meant to get trapped forever inside his head. Just like him, stuck with this new First Order he doesn’t recognize, with a Supreme Leader he doesn’t deem worthy of the very throne he has usurped. Oh, such a bitch is the irony: there was a time when Hux thought he was madly in love with him, his own way – which doesn’t imply planetside romantic escapades and flowers, by the way. He just sort of cared for Kylo Ren, a wild and strange stray animal with which he had good sex and, occasionally, enjoyable conversations – but now he can’t recall when, how long ago it precisely occurred. Could be another lifetime, perhaps, or it could have never happened at all, his mind could have made the whole thing up…a very sick joke indeed.

One can never be sure.

“Stop thinking.”

Ren’s voice is deep, husky and filled with bone-wrenching exhaustion. General Hux shakes his head: as if he could stop his own stream of consciousness out of sheer willpower. No one can. He can’t. it’s Ren who shouldn’t be listening, prying, intruding. It’s Ren who’s doing the wrong thing, not him.

“I can’t. But you can stop listening.”

Ren takes a deep breath and exhales an exaggerate amount of air with a sigh.

“You’re projecting your hatred out loud”, he quietly says, shifting imperceptibly to invade the general’s personal space unapologetically.

“I can’t help it. It’s there. I can’t unleash it yet.”

“Until you kill me.”

“Until I kill you. Timing is everything, you see, because if something goes wrong it’ll result in you killing me and not vice-versa…it will be an unfortunate turn, for me of course. So, yes, for now my so-called hatred is trapped in there, deal with it.”

For a moment, Hux wonders why should Ren _deal with it _instead of having him executed right away. Then again, Ren is…a very peculiar man, so to speak. He’s got motives, but they’re all messed up and, quite frankly, very childish, immature. No leader should be such a child disguised as an adult and functioning human being.

“I don’t want to kill you, Hux.”

The General scoffs.

“Why should you keep me? My loyalty is to the Order, Ren, not to you. So is my commitment. You don’t like it, understandable, so why. Why are you keeping me? _If you needed a punching-sack, you could have asked for one._”

Apparently, Ren isn’t one to take the bait so easily, when it comes to matters that are unrelated to his past. Hux gets to live another day, this time. And, as he expected, his question remains ignored, unanswered.

*

The morning cycle is about to start, now. Hux can tell it because his chrono has started to cast a dim, bluish glow, and it usually happens ten minutes before the lights on the Finalizer switch to the daylight mode.

Ren is still there, though, the General can feel the heat radiating from his body even though they slightly parted sometime during the night. He has slept – napped, to be fair, for a couple of hours more or less –, Ren hasn’t.

He just laid there, unmoving and silent like the shell of a broken droid, and Hux hasn’t asked him to leave, he was too tired even to think about that possibility.

“You’re awake.”

“Yes”, Hux mumbles. “You’ve stayed.”

It slips out of his mouth unwillingly, actually, because it’s almost morning and he hasn’t had his caf yet, nor he had a decent amount of sleep. He’s more uptight, usually: mastering the art of self-control has allowed him not only to survive, but to climb the ranks of the Order as fast as he could without shielding himself behind his _beloved papa’s _name.

“Yes.”

His chrono starts to ring. It’s a quiet, dull and soft tune, the General has never needed loud alarms to get up, he’s not lazy. His bed isn’t comfortable enough to make him crave the proverbial “five more minutes”, especially with Ren tucked under his sheets.

_Still._

Finally, he sits up, allowing himself a glance at Ren while the lights adjust at 67%, blinding him for a split second. He’s still curled on himself, fully clothed, gloves included, a shapeless black lump in a sea of clean and starched white sheets.

_Unhygienic._

_Pathetic._

“Why did you stay?”

Hux doesn’t expect him to answer. The elusive prick does never answer, or when he does, it’s by one-word sentences…otherwise he speaks like a bloody oracle, as if he’s trying really hard to make the conversation as useless as it can be. Talking to a rock, Hux suspects, would be definitely more enlightening, in some cases. This time, though, Ren doesn’t behave like his usual infantile self and gets uncommonly straight to the point.

“I had nowhere else to go”, he whispers, barely audibly.

_He’s got a point._

“Lock the door on your way out. I’m pretty sure you know the passcode yourself”, General Hux says, leaving the bed to get a shower, to get away from him.

_It shall be all for now_, he thinks, stepping naked inside his fresher and hoping that this pathetic excuse of a Supreme Leader doesn’t join him uninvited.

Ren is still in his bed when Hux – _unlike him - _leaves his quarters to attend his duties as a General of the First Order. It’s gonna be a long shift. His face is still swollen and bruised, but no one will dare to ask him if he needs a med droid or bacta patches, a true blessing indeed.

Somewhere halfway through a long corridor, he thinks that one day he’s gonna kill him and claim his throne, or at least he’s gonna try_. _He thinks that his hand will not falter, should the time come.

Deep down, he hopes Kylo Ren is still listening, and his lips curl in a cruel, anticipating smile.

_One day, Ren, one day. Onedayonedayonedayonedayone---_


End file.
